Of all the words that have been written about Donald Trump and his mis-administration, they all distill down to one: that word is stupid. Trump is stupid and the people who work for him are stupid. Stone, stick, bone, stupid. There is no cure for stupid, although education can mitigate for some.

One of the people for whom education has been a mitigating factor is Ben Carson. Maxine Waters calls Carson, “an educated fool.” I have known some of the Ben Carsons of the world. I knew a pediatrician who was a fool like Carson. When I ran into her, she was in her early fifties, lying about being in her thirties, and living in the dark in her condo with comforters on the windows. I frankly didn’t believe she was a doctor, until I saw the license and then I blinked several times. The way she dressed like a barfly and lied non stop, I was not expecting her to identify as a professional woman. She was both a drug addict and an alcoholic at this point in her life, and going through the motions of seeking treatment but not “surrendered” as they say. She was a lot like Donald Trump, so full of herself that she couldn’t see where she was making a fool of herself or participating in her own self destruction.

I also have known any number of lawyers, with high powered academic and professional credentials, but some of them didn’t get the big picture either and like Ben Carson, personified the Peter Principle. They rose in life to a level where they were incompetent. Some of them had money and houses, all the trappings of success, but they were hermits perforce because nobody wanted to have anything to do with them. So it’s obvious that intelligence, per se, is not only relative, it is frequently issue-specific and skill-specific. I don’t doubt that Ben Carson is a gifted surgeon. Neurosurgery is in his wheelhouse. Good for him that he has that skill because if he had to depend upon common sense or social insight to make his living, he would be a janitor. Education makes a person educated. It can and should lead to wisdom, and frequently does, but not always. It is not a quid pro quo.

So here’s what the educated but stupid Dr. Carson had to say on television Sunday morning, when asked what he thought of Donald Trump’s plan to accept the Republican nomination on the 60th anniversary of “Ax Handle Sunday.” He said people should “grow up” and stop looking for “nefarious” connotations in history and dates. Seriously. And Stacey Abrams clobbered him. Listen to this.

Then this exercise in absurdity was topped, if you can believe it, when Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis got on CNN with Brian Stelter and defended her lawsuit threat against CNN. Again, this has to be heard to be believed. It’s worth taking the ten minutes — or listen to as much of it as you can stand — to see, once again, a reflection of how depraved and off beat the Trump administration is.

Here are a few reactions to this scene, where a Trumpite openly insults a television journalist in an anti-media rant. This is a declaration of war, Trump v. Media, and this madwoman is leading the charge.

Yes, if you listen to this you have the feeling of getting dumber by the second, because this is sheer stupidity. And yes, if she promulgated this level of stupidity in a court of law, the judge would likely throw her the hell out.

A stupid, fallacious argument that is repeated with great passion, for the purpose of gaslighting the listener into believing lies is called sophistry. Jenna Ellis is just the newest Trumpite sophist on the block to gain her fifteen minutes of fame by preaching the deranged stupidity which is Trumpism. Trumpism is a dark and dangerous vision, when you get down to it, because it’s built on a foundation of lies and hate and only the stupid and disturbed are going to buy into it. It is ultimately destructive and it is fundamentally un-American. We’ve never listened to a leader before who wanted to nuke hurricanes and drink bleach and who described the teargassing of peaceful protesters as “beautiful.”

We have never, as Americans, had anything this volatile, toxic and fundamentally stupid coming out of our White House. This woman rants about truth and facts, as if she had any clue what those words mean, and the educated fool who is in charge of HUD whitewashes and minimizes the disparagement of respect for dates in our history which are meaningful and admonishes us to forget about them. Dr. Carson doesn’t know that they who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

This is an all out war between truth and lies and between good and bad and fundamentally between wise and stupid. Donald Trump’s most basic quality is his stupidity. That is joined with his obliviousness to decency. He doesn’t know where the lines are drawn. He has no class. These exact same qualities and behaviors are manifest in his staunchest supporters, whether you’re talking about these two buffoons today, or Mike Pompeo, or Peter Navarro, or anybody in this clown car in Washington.

The nation’s collective blood pressure is at a boil now, being subjected to this stupidity, because stupidity is ultimately the root of the evil that we see manifesting in the out of control police brutality that is killing or assaulting our citizens. Some of our police officers, like Donald Trump, are too stupid to know where the lines are drawn, incredible as that is.

Carson was right that we as a society need to grow up. We need to start by getting the idiot man child out of the Oval Office and the school of piranhas which swam in with him, and we need to get back to the principles of decency that this nation was founded upon. Or we will continue to be lost. Only sane, intelligent thinking and planning is going to lead our government and our society out of this dark passage and back into the light. It starts at the ballot box. These idiots and fools need to go.

 

 

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1 COMMENT

    • Two ways to interpret that: 1. The Confederacy lasted four years 2. The confederacy lasted 160 years, because we’re still dealing with the remnants of it today. Or, maybe there’s a third possibility. Stupidity and evil are part of human nature, so Trumpism will always be with us.

      • The first way, Ursula. The harmful remnants stay with us but as I saw someone from Kentucky hilariously point out on Twitter, Nirvana and the poster’s emo phase lasted longer than the real thing. There is no real Trumpism, just opportunism to squeeze the rubes one last time on their way to the cemetery.

    • If we’re lucky, in a couple of years all the people defending him now will be lying about that, too, and trying to convince us they never ever voted for Himself.

  2. I don’t have a problem with Carson’s premise, theoretically speaking. However, as Abrams points out, it is implausible to call Trump events, announcements, executive orders, etc mere “coincidence” because these strange coincidences happen so frequently.

    Here is the poll. http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/06/08/rel6a.-.race.and.2020.pdf See page 9. She is arguing that asking all adults instead of registered or likely voters is not proper polling procedure. However, n= 1,125 registered voters. She will lose in court.

    Then she deflects to an oped that may or may not contain a demonstrably false statement, and asks Brian theoretical questions that if he answered, would be edited into propaganda sound bites on right -wing media. Maybe a lawyer can confirm or reject, but are media outlets required to fact-check oped? I doubt i Isn’t the standard is that a news outlet is responsible only for the content they themselves produce, not what someone else produces?

    Good on Brian for not letting her create any clean sound bites.

  3. Carson, a brilliant neurosurgeon won the much coveted Darwin Award for performing the first ever selfie lobotomy. Details a 6.

  4. ” So it’s obvious that intelligence, per se, is not only relative, it is frequently issue-specific and skill-specific. ”
    That seems accurate, as many I used to think intelligent, or to have respect for, are Trump fans. I have wondered about this for years. I assume that is from how one was inculcated from childhood. Nourish over Nature, iow.

    Education can impart knowledge. But not intelligence. Nor understanding. Nor wisdom. Both of which, like intelligence, come from within, but unlike intelligence also come from the heart.

  5. I can’t agree with you that education can mitigate stupidity for some. Judge Judy is right when she says, “You can’t fix stupid.” We are not talking here mental deficiency because “stupidity” is an offensively false synonym. I’m talking choice here.

    Now ignorance is fixable for some by educating them. Afterward, they are no longer ignorant. They have knowledge. It is the other mind set “WILLFUL ignorance,” of which I speak. For me the true definition of stupidity is simply willful ignorance.

    Mary Wollstonecraft got it right way back in 1792, when she penned a variation on an earlier poem” “Convince a man against his will, He’s of the same opinion still.”

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